Monday, July 1, 2013

One of the perennial problems in writing any document dealing with multiple languages is choosing a font that can handle everything. Add a little linguistics, and things get very messy. Since I wrote the first part in this series, I have discovered a new font that's designed for this sort of linguistic work, the Brill. It's been in development for a while, but I hadn't checked it in more than a year, waiting for the bold. Now it's ready.

It has several character sets (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, IPA), special glyphs for some humanist work, and, best of all, has true bold, italics and small caps which harmonize nicely with the rest of the text.

It's free for non-commercial use — which describes most of us conlangers — so give it a try. I've been working on a personal language document with this font, and it really is very nice. I'm not 100% fond of the italics, but I'll put up with that for true small caps and a well-integrated polytonic Greek.